Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

January 15, 2013

The future of programming [A Cacophony of Semantic Primitives]

Filed under: Identity,Programming — Patrick Durusau @ 8:30 pm

The future of programming by Edd Dumbill.

You need to read Edd’s post on the future of programming in full, but there are two points I would like to pull out for your attention:

  1. Expansion of people engaged in programming:

    In our age of exploding data, the ability to do some kind of programming is increasingly important to every job, and programming is no longer the sole preserve of an engineering priesthood.

  2. Data as first class citizen

    As data and its analysis grow in importance, there’s a corresponding rise in use and popularity of languages that treat data as a first class citizen. Obviously, statistical languages such as R are rising on this tide, but within general purpose programming there’s a bias to languages such as Python or Clojure, which make data easier to manipulate.

The most famous occasion when a priesthood lost the power of sole interpretation was the Protestant Reformation.

Although there was already a wide range of interpretations, as the priesthood of believers grew over the centuries, so did the diversity of interpretation and semantics.

Even though there is a wide range of semantics in programming already, the broader participation becomes, the broader the semantics of programming will grow. Not in terms of the formal semantics as defined by language designers but as used by programmers.

Semantics being the province of usage, I am betting on semantics as used being the clear winner.

Data being treated as a first class citizen carries with it the seeds of even more semantic diversity. Data, after all, originates with users and is only meaningful when some user interprets it.

Users are going to “see” data as having the semantics they attribute to it, not the semantics as defined by other programmers or sources.

To use another analogy from religion, the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible can be read in the context of Ancient Near Eastern religions and practices or taken as a day by day calendar from the point of creation. And several variations in between. All relying on the same text.

For decades programmers have pretended programming was based on semantic primitives. Semantic primitives that could be reliably interchanged, albeit sometimes with difficulty, with other systems. But users and their data are shattering the illusion of semantic primitives.

More accurately they are putting other notions of semantic primitives into play.

A cacophony of semantic primitives bodes poorly for a future of distributed, device, data and democratized computing.

Avoidable to the degree that we choose to not silently rely upon others “knowing what we meant.”

I first saw this at The four D’s of programming’s future: data, distributed, device, democratized by David Smith.

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